Lucca (34 page)

H
e had not shaved for several days, and her scarf caught in his long stubble when they embraced. You've still got this, have you? he mumbled, smiling pensively and touching the soft petrol-blue silk. It had been the first present he gave her, shortly after she arrived in Rome, one afternoon as they were walking up the Via Condotti. The stubble scratched her face and made her feel she was waking up. She had been going around like a sleepwalker, alone in the house when Lauritz was at nursery school, left to all the needless worries she had been embroidering because she had nothing better to do. They faded and vanished like the images of a meaningless dream when Andreas picked up her suitcase and they left the airport building to find a taxi. She repeated the funny things Lauritz had said and described how she had repaired the hole in the wall around the stove pipe and arranged the books in alphabetical order. So now Harold Pinter had his place beside
Pinocchio
! As she gradually ran out of things to report on they contented themselves with exchanging kisses on the back seat of the taxi, a little shy as they usually were when they had been away from each other and were picking up the threads again.

She nestled into his arms and breathed in the scent of his leather jacket as his hand slid up her thigh under the short skirt. He caressed the bare skin between the top of the stocking and her suspender belt. Only the taxi driver's ironic gaze in the back mirror stopped them throwing themselves at each other. She could see her forehead and her dishevelled auburn hair falling over his leather sleeve beside the driver's dark African eyes. Beneath the motorway, in an anonymous district of neglected housing blocks, she saw a half-demolished house and a crane
with a lead ball swinging against a building where the front wall had been cut away. The multi-coloured squares of wallpaper and paint on the smashed storeys were all that remained of one-time apartments. A second later the wall was pulverised in a grey cascade of dust and broken bricks.

She had lived with him in Trastevere for a month when she woke up one morning to find his fingers running through her hair down to the scalp. He looked at her as if he had caught her in the act. But your hair is fair, he said. Her own hair colour had begun to grow out and displace the black dye she had worn for months. I am not the person you think I am, she smiled mysteriously and told him why it had been a black-haired woman he met in Spain. Was he disappointed? He looked at her teasingly. And he had been dreaming about a fiery gypsy lass . . . he had even travelled all the way from Rome to Copenhagen!

She shook her head so her hair fell down over her eyes. She could easily learn to dance flamenco. He kissed her and said it wasn't worth the trouble. A few weeks later, when her hair had grown and she really looked skewbald, she went into a barber's shop in Trastevere and asked to be shorn. At first the barber refused with a pained gesture, but when she left the shop she was as bare-headed as an Arab boy. Never before had she known the feeling of air on the top of her head and her temples, and as she walked along the street enjoying people's glances she felt as if her head was weightless and at any moment could take off like a balloon over the roofs of Rome.

The apartment was in a quiet, narrow side street to the Rue de Rennes. It was an attic apartment on two floors with one window from floor to ceiling looking out on a cramped courtyard. From the studio a staircase led up to a bedroom with French windows and a balcony with a view over the slanting zinc roofs and rows of chimney pots ranged close together. Everything was in shades of grey, the sky, the roofs and the walls. Behind a sooty party wall you could glimpse the Tour de Montparnasse far away, with lit windows in the
evening. That was the only light visible from the balcony, in the middle of that enormous city.

She lay in the dusk listening to the distant sound of traffic. The air was cool on her bare shoulders, but she couldn't be bothered to get up and close the balcony doors. She wanted to lie feeling the air, listening to the sounds of the city while she waited for him to come back. He had gone shopping, she was too tired to go out to eat. She had got up early to catch the plane, Else had driven her to the station with Lauritz. He had cried on the platform, but Else had said she should just go. The train was about to leave without her, as she kneeled down to the boy and tried to comfort him.

She considered calling home, but decided to wait. It might make him miss her still more, now he most probably had stopped being miserable. The light from Andreas's laptop computer shone in the semi-darkness of the room. A shining white square floating among the dim outlines of furniture. He had not turned it off when he left for the airport, and as soon as they entered the apartment they fell into bed. But it had not come up to her expectations in the taxi, sitting with his hand between her thighs while she pressed her palm against the hard bulge in his trousers. She had kept her suspender belt and stockings on in bed, and the shoes with ankle straps, in the way she knew he liked and had maybe imagined her in the weeks he had been alone. When she dressed in the morning she had remembered to put her pants on outside the suspender belt. It seemed a bit comical to her now, when she took off her shoes and stockings and cuddled up to him under the duvet, wondering if he was disappointed.

It had not been as wild and passionate as she had wanted it to be. It had been the way it was when they were both tired and did not make love because they were completely swept away by desire but rather because they desired the idea of being close again instead of just falling asleep. He asked if she had come properly. She smiled at him fondly. It didn't matter. She was happy just to lie here and feel him beside her. He stroked her hair, she pushed her head under his chin. She asked if he had
finished his play. Almost, he said. There was only the end to do now. When she went back to work, she said, she would like to have a part in one of his plays. It wouldn't need to be a leading part, she would be happy with a small one. She could come in with a letter!

She felt the need of a cigarette and got out of bed. The Tour de Montparnasse had turned into no more than a stack of little, shining cubes in the blue darkness. She switched on the lamp on the writing desk and took the carton of cigarettes out of the plastic bag from the airport. She couldn't find her lighter and there wasn't one on the desk either. She walked downstairs with the cigarette hanging from her lips, still naked, and thought that if she had a spotlight on her now she would look like a stripper coming down to ask one of the men in the audience for a light, as part of the show. There must be a lighter somewhere. Distrait as he was, Andreas always kept two or three plastic lighters going at the same time. She caught sight of his tweed jacket on a hanger behind the front door. The one he occasionally wore when he dropped his image of the young rebel. His Arthur Miller jacket, she called it. He did look a bit like Arthur Miller when he wore it, if you left out the horn-rimmed spectacles. It must be the prominent chin they had in common. As she searched through the pockets she heard a rustling sound. An envelope was sticking out of the breast pocket.

She might have just let it go, she thought later. She had never been through his pockets before, and never read his letters. She knew it was wrong, but she did it all the same. Was it intuition that made her take the envelope from his pocket, or was it ordinary, thoughtless curiosity? It was an airmail letter with a Swedish stamp, posted in Stockholm just over a week before. She could still have changed her mind as she held it in her hand. The letter bore no sender's name, but the writing on the envelope was a woman's, she could see, a young woman's. Andreas's name and address in Paris was written in felt tip and architectural capital letters, regular, very clear and with a weakness for calligraphic curlicues.

After she had read the letter three times she folded it up, put it back in the envelope and stuck it in the breast pocket of the tweed jacket, taking care to see that the stamp bearing Carl Gustav's puppyish playboy face was on the left side of the pocket, as she had found it. She went into the bathroom, kneeled down in front of the lavatory pan and vomited until she was empty. The cold of the floor and the spasms in her stomach made her shudder. She locked the door, sat in the bath and crouched with her knees under her chin and one foot on top of the other. She turned on the hot water and held the shower against her head until the scalding water made her cry out with pain. Only then did she start to weep. She turned on the cold tap, not too much, and sat sobbing under the hot stream of water that surrounded her like a steaming cloak. She closed her eyes and pictured the house she had seen being torn down on the way into Paris. The remains of a condemned suburban building with gaping window openings, flapping remnants of wallpaper and gnawed-off storey divisions that sank soundlessly in a cloud of pulverised bricks, a grey waterfall of dust.

She was still sitting in the bath weeping when she heard the front door slam and Andreas calling. She stopped sobbing. Soon afterwards he turned the door handle and said through the door that he was going to start cooking. She turned off the water and slowly stood up, stiff from sitting in the same position for so long. The steam had misted up the mirror over the wash basin. She wiped it with her hand and looked at her tear-stained face. Her eyelids were red and swollen. She wrapped herself in a towel and went into the kitchen. He raised his eyes from the steaks frying in the pan and looked at her worriedly. She said she had been sick. It must have been something she ate on the plane. He stroked her cheeks sympathetically, first one, then the other, and concentrated on the steaks again. She opened the window to let out the odour of cooking. He told her about a Japanese chef who had committed hara-kiri when the passengers on a plane had fallen ill because he had cooked with an infected finger. He showed
her both his hands, grinning. No infection! She went upstairs to dress.

She had decided not to say anything. The decision had almost made itself when she heard him come in. She would wait and see what happened. She could not get down a single mouthful of the steak he served up for her. She managed a little salad, but drank up quickly when he refilled her glass. The red wine had a calming effect and soothed the clutching feeling in her stomach. She was impressed at his cold-bloodedness. He said he wanted to go up to Belleville next day and take photographs of the Arab district. If she felt better, he added kindly. She nodded. That would be good, she felt fine now. It had helped to empty out her stomach. He even stroked her hand, which lay beside her plate of cold steak.

They watched a film on television, she went upstairs before it ended. She undressed and lay down on the bed naked. She heard him pull the cord in the bathroom and water running in the wash basin, and shortly afterwards his step on the stair. She closed her eyes. The sound of steps stopped in the doorway. She told him to cover her face with the blue scarf. He hesitated before complying. The light from the lamp on the desk penetrated the closely woven silk threads and took on their colour. She heard the sirens of an ambulance on the Rue de Rennes and someone shouting in the street. She lay like that, without a face, delivered to his gaze, with empty eye sockets and a dark slit between her lips where the silk was sucked in each time she drew breath.

When she woke up next morning Andreas was working at the dining table in what had once been a studio and was now furnished as a living room. She made coffee and placed a cup beside his computer. He caressed her thigh vaguely without looking up from the screen. She took her own coffee up on the balcony. She leaned over the railing, looking at the occasional pedestrians. It was a long way down. Would you pass out before you hit the ground? The sun was shining and if she pulled her coat round her shoulders it was warm enough to sit outside. She leaned back with closed eyes.

It probably did not occur to him that she would go through his pockets. Actually it was her own fault that everything between them was suddenly changed. But to him it might be just a harmless affair, otherwise he would mention it. She was not sure though. In the letter at least it did not sound like a digression, a single bonk to freshen things up a bit. How passionate they were, the words written in neat, architectural block letters. They were even garnished with graceful little drawings as proof of the sender's feminine charm, here a bird, there a star and a naked lady, rather à la Matisse. She wrote that the colours around her had grown brighter since she had met him. She couldn't sleep at night, she was afraid of going off her head. She had been living in a daze for too long, in a relationship that made her feel she was invisible. Just as he had, if she had understood him rightly. When she stood in front of the mirror it felt as if the mirror was looking at her with his gaze. As if she was seeing herself for the first time.

Lucca had sat for a long time studying her while Andreas was out shopping. She could well understand when she saw the polaroid picture that fell out of the envelope. His correspondent was pale and had blue eyes and curly, jet-black hair. A gypsy with blue eyes, of course that had been irresistible. After all, he did have a weakness for black hair. She sat on a double bed, her hair glittered in the morning sun which reached exactly to her breasts. Andreas had hardly been the one who had taken the photo, if so he would have kept it. She must have sent him a picture taken by someone else. But who had snapped her naked in an unmade bed? Andreas must have wondered about that too.

Even though the letter lacked any prosaic details as to who or what the woman was in real life, Lucca could work out that they must have met in Malmö during the rehearsals for Andreas's play, which had been so important for him to attend several times a week. Perhaps she was an actor. A Swedish colleague! Lucca remembered his impatience in the morning, when he was leaving and had promised to drive Lauritz to nursery school first. How irritated he had been when the boy sat over his
porridge half asleep. There were several references in the letter to something Andreas had said or written to her. In one place she actually quoted him. He was right, she wrote. Sometimes you did have to believe your own eyes. Otherwise you risked everything around you becoming as fleeting and unreal as a film. She too would like to meet him again. Unfortunately she could not get to Paris for the week after Easter.